Monday, December 8, 2014

The species of great ape to which I belong is characterized
by an adaptation unique in biological history: it stores and sorts information
gathered from the senses in such a way that the information can be constructed
into a “reality” separated from the biophysical Reality in which it originated
[1].This process (adaptation) began in
small ways; that is, little sub-realities were manufactured from primary
biophysical Reality (as perceived by sense organs).These sub-realities were (are) of two types:
(1) summarizing images or maps of experience and (2) what-if constructions that
project details of experience into forms that have not yet occurred, and thus,
have not been experienced in fact [2].

There are great and far-reaching implications of this
adaptation, but at the moment I am interested in how goals, problems and
solutions are created in a goal-less, problem-less and solution-less
universe.The previous essay ends with
this with this conundrum.

First and most obviously, given that the whole nature of
our adaptation is to create reality-less “realities” as models for specific
actionable parts of the biophysical Reality, then the structures upon which our
operating systems are based are illusory; a great part of our difficult in
getting on in present world results from our failure to realize this simple
fact [3].But, since we are, today,
almost entirely dependent of the illusion – as a way of actually acting in
Biophysical Reality – giving up illusion is not an option.This doesn’t mean, however, that we cannot or
must not recognize illusion, just that when we do recognize it, the
machinations of the illusion must be continued until they can be replaced with
increasingly less illusory designs.

The reason for this is the way the Consciousness System of
Order functions.Just as genetics is the
means by which organisms change to fit their environments (natural or human
contrived), so CSO processes are the way that human adaptation proceeds. And
the CSO functions on illusions organized from non-random details of Biophysical
Reality.At the most basic level, there
is no ground, no tree, no animal, no stream or ocean.These are atom particles (and smaller)
assembled and functioning by principles both of actionable importance and
irrelevant to living things.All living
things function at this most primary state of “illusion,” being uninfluenced by
and “unaware” of many of the most essential aspects of the physical
universe.The human species has carried
this “unawareness” to unprecedented levels, acting in the world as if only
their illusory constructions were and are real.

At the most simple level, humans tend to see goals,
problems and solutions as central to their existence.These are the forms by which experience is
organized.In almost all other organisms
environmental events are routed through genetically designed physiological and
neural processes: there are no goals, problems or solutions; there are only
responses.For humans, CSO processes
have been inserted in between environmental sensory event and response [4]. This insertion has, from all the other
possibilities, taken the form of goals, problems and solutions.

There is only one reason not to just abandon ourselves to
this design; it is an illusion.So long
as environmental Reality had an immediacy in our responses, the illusion was a
powerful adaptive device giving the human animal great advantages.But, as our “successes” grew, becoming
exponential, the illusion has come to challenge Reality and has taken primacy
in human life.It is difficult to image
a more dangerous situation.

The major events of our present world can be seen as a
conflict between the application of the illusions within which we are immersed
and the environmental Realities that are impinging on our actions (and that our
actions are impinging on!).There can be
no parsing of goals, problems and solutions to the existence of 7 billions of
150 pound animals roaming the earth uprooting its forests, stripping off its
soils, exposing the surface to toxic subsurface materials, polluting the
surface waters, changing the composition of the atmosphere and so much more.

We can imagine no goal; we can define no problem; there is no
solution.There is only the illusion
that our illusions will continue to be effective.

[1] The argument can be quite cogently made that all
nervous system – even all physiological – responses to environmental events are
sub-reality models and not the environmental realities themselves.These response systems are sensitive to
specific movements of the totality and therefore are not an exact
representation of that totality; it could not be otherwise since living systems
are specialized material/energy arrangements using very particular parts of the
totality to sustain their form and function.I would argue, however, that there is an immediacy in the relationship
of the Living Order to the Physical Order that ties its response models to the
biophysical totality, an immediacy that the Consciousness Order is adapted to defeat
just as the Living Order is adapted to defeat the immediacy of entropy.

[2] It must be noted that such consciousness created
“experience” has no reliable way to be distinguished from sensory-based
experience and has become a major source for the dis-integration of human
functionality within biophysical functionality.

[3] Some examples to clarify: religions, economic models,
political systems, social systems are all illusory: that is, they are based on
constructed “realities” with no basis in biological or physical Reality.They are entirely constructed in
consciousness process and exist only as the Stories that we tell about
ourselves.This doesn’t mean, however,
that we can do without them; they are the product of the primary human
adaptation.They are simply out of
control (by Biophysical Reality) at the present time.

[4] CSO processes are operated on a neural substrate, but
are more than a nervous system process in the same way that the primary energy
exchanges of life are operated on the behaviors of electrons: the motions of
the ameboid cells of a slime-mold would never be predicted from the qualities
of an electron!

Saturday, November 8, 2014

The solution to any problem is primarily made up of two
parts: the desired outcome and the options of performance;
psycho-bio-physically unattainable goals (or undefined goals) and unperformable
actions (or performable actions that are unrelated to the issues) only amplify
difficulties.But, before getting into
the human domain of problems, there is context.

In the Physical Order – the overwhelmingly predominant ordering system – there are no goals or problems, only events in process. In the Living Order there is one primary goal
for all living things: continuity of genetic replication – and from that goal, the
generation of vast varieties of performable actions.Problems are a particular kind: How, under
specific circumstances, to gather sufficient energy and materials to support
the replication of genetic material.The
primary solution to this problem on the earth has been for the genetic material
to manifest a phenotype – a biological body with specific capacities to act in
the world.From this “solution,” many
trillions of optional manifest forms have acted their genetically programed
designs on the world.

But, the “goal” of the Living Order is of a type unfamiliar
in the daily processes of the organism that invented goals. First, there is no
apparent repository of that goal; it does not reside as an identifiable entity
or structure with an identifiable form like a molecular system, brain, written
communication or code in a computing device.And so we ‘goal givers’ have almost irretrievably distorted our
understanding of both the physical and the living state by requiring a human
like storage device or entity for what seems to us to be “directed”
actions.And this distortion has
completely deformed our understanding of ourselves. [1]

Briefly, the primary goal of the Living Order is contained,
in a sense, in the localized stability of the planetary surface.Millions of millions of chemical and physical
options have been given opportunity by that stability; options with vanishingly
small probabilities become certainties given near infinities of time and
occurrence.Of these possibilities some
tiny few are of such a form that once they form, their design facilitates the
generation of others like themselves.Quite suddenly then, chemical/physical forms that had a tiny probability
of occurrence have a much higher probability – so long as the conditions remain
stabile or only very slowly changing. It
is this continuity of occurrence that is the sine qua non of life: the
essential “goal” of life is, in human terms, no goal at all.

Without goals there are no problems.Various philosophical and ‘religious’ systems
have understood and advocated this reality for thousands of years. It is
telling of our natures that so simple, obvious and revelatory a truth should be
so thoroughly unheeded.Our human world
seems to be nothing but goals – their attendant problems as far as the eye can
see in the distance and future.

Keeping in mind that the vast expanse of the universe has
no goals and that the living world of the planetary surface has only the ‘goal’
of, what might be called, molecular momentum, all the myriad goals associated
with the human animal, goals which are increasingly influencing the surface of
the earth, are completely the production of an evolved adaptation manifest in
humans, orders of magnitude beyond its marginal occurrence in other animals.The very nature of our thought is an evolved
process, one of many optional processes that proved efficacious in maintaining
the molecular momentum at the moment of its biological selection – like the
evolutionary paths that led from retinol to eye ball or calcium storage in
brackish water pre-teleost fishes leading to the boney skeletons of land
vertebrates.

Human thought is made of goals and problems, options and
solutions; and in our most basic and primary ignorance of the realities of a
goal-less, problem-less and solution-less world, we attribute the artifice of
our processes onto the world as a first reality.

A thoughtful reader might at this point question (I, as a thoughtful writer, ask as well): “How is this analysis any help in mitigating the
mal-adaptive behaviors, writ large, of our species?”The simple and ironic answer is, of course,
it is of no particular use: the truth is of no use. And then, in homage to those ancient souls who
figured all of this out 3 thousand or more years ago: it is the only
answer.The truth is of no use and it is the only answer.

Does that sound like gobbledygook? Well, of course, it is
and it isn’t.If you are thoroughly
embedded in the goal-problem paradigm, then it is mindless prattle, useless in
the discovery of the solutions to our problems.However, if you can step out of the structures of our evolved
adaptations – that ability is actually part of the adaptation – it is possible
to begin to realize that problems are solved not by creating new goals, but by
recognizing and evaporating the goals that create the problems in the first
place.Some examples:

Personal: The goal – person ‘A’ will meet my needs, which
generates the problem that my needs are not met.Solution – put person ‘A’ into a position
where he or she must, under penalty, do what I want.You see? The goal of having my needs met by
person ‘A’ forms the problem that my needs are not met, which creates the goal
of forcing person ‘A’ to act as I desire (my goal for that person).This can go on and on.Another option would be to discover ways to
‘make’ person ‘A’ want to meet my needs; this is yet another goal generating
another set of problems.

Without the first goal, the rest disappears.This is what all other animals do – they
adapt to their environment rather than attempting to force the environment to
act as they wish.Which should make
clear that ‘doing as we wish’ requires a wish – and a need to understand the
origin of our wishes!

The political grows from and mirrors the personal process;
it is a matter of getting a team together to act on stereotyped goals,
problems, options and solutions.The
“intelligence” of 5 people compatibly working together on an identifiable
problem is increased over that of the smartest person in the room (assuming a
common, openly shared goal).The
“intelligence” of a crowd of a 100 people is reduced to the IQ of the
pitchforks they carry.This both
suggests something about the origins of our thought processes and the ways in
which we might organize our societies to minimize the complexities of goal
setting.

As useful (or useless) as it might be to understand that
goal setting is the primary source of our problems in the first place, it no
way relieves our most basic biological “illness”: our human adaptation is to create
goals and identify problems and options for meeting those goals.This is a new process and a specialized
artifice in an otherwise goal-less universe.This adaptation has now begun to press against the most basic goal-less
“goal” of the Living Order, the molecular momentum of genetic continuity.The completely goal-less universe is neutral
on the subject.

This seems worthy of further consideration.

[1] Many will recognize this as the problem of teleology:
the attribution of some ‘purpose’ as a cause.
I am avoiding this language for two reasons. First, the standard language has been mutilated
beyond repair and is no longer cognitively and emotionally related to the
issues and, second, the primary distortion of seeing ‘purpose’ as a substantive
reality rather than as a Consciousness Order shorthand for a mental process.

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Here is another compulsive act of futility, another
linguistic construction project to add a few more walls to our mental prison:
efforts at explanation and clarity so often end up being just as confining as
the originating confusions.

Language is a trap – and yet it is the pivotal means by
which we expand our options beyond the limitations of the Living System of
Order.Almost any arrangement of words,
that meet the basic requirements of syntactical order, can be imbued with
behavioral/biological consequences; even non-sense collections of language-like
sounds can be so infused given sufficient reinforced repetition.One need only listen to a random selection of
AM radio or eavesdrop on conversations in a coffee shop to realize the
arbitrariness with which our language constructs the walls, fences and ditches
of our understanding.

The first great danger is that we will assume that language
can define the full expanse of our reality; the second great danger is that we
will assume that it cannot inform our understanding at all, leaving us, in all
appearances, without any device or devices to take on the challenges so
obviously before us: the challenges are real beyond language, demanding
solutions beyond rhetoric and yet we are left only with language as the means
to bring together a sufficiency of organized action to meet them.

And thus, I find myself at a computer keyboard pushing
buttons in the essentially vain (both senses) effort to pour the abstraction of
Consciousness Order waters onto the concrete reality of Living Order fires:
pouring imaginary confetti mixed with imaginary brickbats onto an imaginary
parade of war heroes and zombies; it feels a bit like trying to teach algebra
to a puppy (that actually knows as much algebra and calculus as it will ever
need already. Just watch it catch a Frisbee!).

Well, clearly we humans don’t know all that we need to
know.And this is in main-part because
we are trying to know about how to live in the world by how we think about the
world.To put it as bluntly as possible:
thinking and its tool, language, did not evolve/adapt to replace living, only
to supplement the primary informational impacts of living.Thinking and language have long since run out
beyond the cliff edge like the cartoon coyote (Roadrunner cartoons… an
essential metaphor for modern life) and are “running” and “climbing” on the
air, suspended only by the ignorance of falling.

So much for my display of angst!What is to be done?

First and foremost,
nothing.There are 7 billion people
on the earth and only some few millions are ready to take on the problem in a
meaningful way.Another several million,
the power elites, are positioned to take over, or have taken over, the present
distortions for their personal benefit; they have no interest in weakening the
vast ignorance rooted in the impunity with which they live.Hundreds of millions of people might, given a
reasonable opportunity, adopt and adapt to ways of life more compatible with
the Living Order, but this would require large changes in the metaphors that
organize our lives; that is, adopting metaphors that use thinking and language
to give up thinking and language as our first organizing principles, but the primary
means to control the metaphors is, not without intention, firmly in the hands of
the power elites.

Second and
second-most, a lot.There is so much
to do!Getting living right for yourself is the necessary step for getting
living right for the larger community; and to do that it is necessary to
figuratively (and perhaps literally) step out of the existing communities of
experience and expectation (present metaphors).This is especially true for the organizing functions of status systems.

We, humans, are a primate-pattern animal.Our social systems come out of the genetics
of primate community structure (this is an obvious conclusion of chimp, gorilla
and baboon ethology).Does your computer
ever need a hug? Does a Mercedes ‘feel’ better about itself than a Kia?Does a kitchen appliance blush with pride at
a compliment?The reality is that our
primary nature is as a status-based community animal.Social status systems evolved to organize the
community for effective functioning in the ecology; motives of status are as
much a part of us as fingers and thumbs.

But social systems have come to be given detail by the
metaphors assigned by our stories about ourselves; this is the consequence of
our Consciousness Order, a layer of activity laid over the form of our biology
like a coat of paint, capable of obscuring inherent form while in no way
changing it.

A focus on the details of the many injustices, inequities,
crimes and maladaptive misbehaviors that surround us can offer no relief
without an underlying change in how we view social status.In a monumental perversity, we have come to
accord high-value status to those who steal the most from the Great Many.

In a community of equity (not the same as everyone having
equal amounts of all production regardless of contribution) and transparency,
it is obvious to all participants who is contributing, what and how much; it is
also clear who is stealing or attempting to steal from the contributions of
others.It is natural in such a
community to have social patterns of status built on cooperation and
contributions to social stability and sustenance as well as on displays of
power, bravery and possessions.

We will not, of course, as a society or as a species, make
such changes; our imaginings are more real than the reality within which and to
which we must readapt if we are to continue being a part of the Living
Order.But, that the large collections
of us will not recognize and adopt salutary status systems is no reason not to
create, value and live in such status systems either personally or within ad
hoc communities.

As much as we may wish to avoid the recognition, our
situation is simplicity itself.The
world’s billions and the world’s dominating elites cannot and will not lead
collected humanity toward ways of living within the limits of ecological
necessity [1]; in fact, the world’s billions will collectively demand an
unattainable bit more for each and everyone (many with justification and some
without) and the power elites will demand continued access to vast excess,
imperiously condemning everyone else to servitude and deprivation.

All that is actually left for those who see the world with
some depth and clarity is to construct their own social systems using the
larger dominating structures as the “eco-social-systems” within, or upon, which
they must live.This is not the most
desirable choice – it is simply the only choice.

I’m not suggesting lives of quiet desperation, rather lives
of deliberate and proud social difference; an active as well as passive
rejection of social status systems that give support and value to the theft of
labor and the other social contributions made by the vast majority of
humanity.What we call being ‘rich’ can
be seen as the crime it is, and more importantly, those who are rich can be socially condemned as accessories before or after the fact as we would anyone else
who is part of a criminal conspiracy [2].

Most of society is so marinated in the madness of material
accumulation, so devoted to the status system and social/economic organizing
designs of money wealth, that freeing one’s self from the powerful web of
influences is difficult.Rejecting what
“everyone else” believes to be true requires both excellent reasons and
personal strength.I can’t speak to
personal strength – that is guided and attained in many ways – but the
excellent reasons are piling up fast.

These reasons are broadly of two types: the failures of our
specieshood, that is, the alienation of our biology, with the resulting
physical and mental illnesses, by our socially created distortions of reality, and,
secondly, the destruction of environment endangering the whole living
enterprise as it is presently functioning. The former creates a creature uprooted from
the living earth and arrogant in its powers of destruction and the latter sets
the stage for the future of the extant ecological order.

[1] There must be a structural ‘engine’ of change of
sufficient range and scope integrated into the existing social order, an
‘engine’ capable of responding to the relevant informational inputs that
presage both the necessity and direction of change; there is no such
‘engine.’ The democratic, egalitarian
social council of elders – the archetype of decision making for the human
community – is a completely compromised design in the present world. We are left with only raw evolutionary
biology as the inevitable uncompromising change machine.

[2] Many social systems have engaged in actions that were
eventually realized as immoral and criminal.
Piracy and robbery have often been considered “normal” economic activity
by peoples living on trade routes.
Chattel slavery was considered perfectly correct by most Americans only
a few generations ago. The economic and
political elites of today are like the slave owners of the past in their
attitudes toward those over which they have power; they are like the pirates of
the recent past who considered their robberies and murders as the “natural
right” of people “smart” enough to get away with them. How to accomplish such a transition of
attitude without the excesses of the French Revolution will be one of the
conundrums of the near future.

Banner image created by Jaco Finch

Metacognition: “awareness and understanding of one's own thought processes.”

I am only somewhat offended by the term metacognition – it is phony sounding, like a magician’s trick – but it is what is needed, more than anything else.We can think without thinking about it; in fact, we usually do.There is nothing wrong with that if the data sources from which we acquire the raw material of thought are true to Reality.Organizing experience in new and novel ways, when the experiences themselves were based in Reality is how thinking came to be so useful.

But unlike the over 150 thousand years of our species’ history and the millions of years of hominid history, in the last few thousand years, and especially today, our experiences are anything but Reality – or perhaps better said, our experiences have become so complex that sorting out the realities that matter from the realities that are irrelevant has become very difficult.And to put it bluntly, much of human activity today is devoted to lying about or misrepresenting significant amounts of information vital to our needs.This is in part from cynical attempts to control the behavior of people and in part from a accumulated monumental ignorance about what is real.

It has become essential that an increasing number of people learn to think about thinking:it is that need to which this blog is dedicated.I will be searching for and posting or linking to essays, philosophical and scientific papers and other materials about this process.Occasionally I will annotate a news story or opinion piece attempting to model the metacognitive processes.Original work submitted by readers would be appreciated, but I will only post those most directly related to this subject and that also make a substantive contribution.